Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [26]
Out of 560 members, many “backwoods” peers, as they were called, never took their seats at all. Others appeared only at times of crisis and hardly more than fifty regularly attended the sessions. It was, said Lord Newton, “the most good-natured assembly that exists,” hearing out speakers who would not be listened to for five minutes in the Commons. Its debates were “always polite” and conducted with a restraint which seemed to show “detachment almost amounting to indifference.” Party animosity was concealed “under a veil of studied courtesy.” It was not a stimulating audience, especially to Liberals, whose leader, Lord Rosebery, complained that “every auditor gives the impression of profound weariness and boredom.”
While Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister the House of Lords was entirely under his dominance, although its official ruler was the Lord Chancellor, who acted as Speaker. This office was now held by Lord Halsbury, born a commoner, by name Hardinge Giffard, a member of one of the oldest families in England. Its founder had fought at Hastings and was later created Earl of Buckingham by William Rufus. Although the title died out in the next generation, the family persisted with vigor if not riches and the sprightly Lord Chancellor, seventy-two at this time, lived to be ninety-eight. A stubby Pickwickian figure with short legs, red cheeks, white tufts of hair over his ears and a humorous expression, Lord Halsbury, despite his genial manner, was a hard opponent, implacable at the bar, with a relentless memory. He wore a frock coat, a square-topped derby hat, a “true blue” Tory tie and, according to a younger member of the Upper House, “invariably objected on principle to all change.” Owing to meagre family finances, he had been educated at home by his father, a barrister and editor of a high Tory daily paper, the Standard, who gave him lessons in Greek, Latin and Hebrew until 4 A.M. and was so upright that he refused an offer from the Duke of Newcastle, an admirer of his paper, to put his three sons through Oxford. The youngest son went through Merton College nevertheless, rose rapidly to the top of the legal profession, acquiring wealth and friends on the way as well as the accusation from some quarters that he “filled his great office with jolly cynicism” and made unscrupulous use of the Bench for political patronage. However, when from among many rival claimants he was named Lord Chancellor, making him the highest-ranking personage after the royal family and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the “Carlton Club supported him to a man,” and Lord Coleridge, the Lord Chief Justice and a Liberal, wrote, “Your politics are of course unintelligible to me but in everything else, as a scholar, a gentleman and a lawyer, there is no one fitter to be our head.”
Two high-ranking peers in Lord Salisbury’s Cabinet, the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne and the eighth Duke of Devonshire, were both Whigs of pedigree and converts to the Conservatives. Lord Lansdowne, the Secretary for War, was an aristocrat who looked it every inch. Smooth and cold as polished stone, elegant, correct and courteous, he was an obvious choice for the great ceremonial posts and had been Governor-General of Canada at thirty-eight and Viceroy of India at forty-three. His family name was Fitzmaurice. In the Twelfth Century the first of his line had settled in Ireland in county Kerry and the current Marquess was twenty-eighth Lord of Kerry in the direct male line. He was one of those Anglo-Irishmen, said the Spectator in commenting on the quality of Lord Salisbury’s Government, “who can rule by a sort of instinct.” The instinct had flourished in his great-grandfather, the first Marquess, who as Earl of Shelburne had been a secretary